What common sense or otherwise useful ideas would you like to see in video games, but somehow never happens?
I’ll go first. I was thinking the other day about how many games (mostly RPG’s) have wasted dialogue options. Most of the time they have three optios whenever you have to choose something: the super-nice suck-up version, where you constantly abase yourself before people because that’s being “good”, the greedy version where you ask for more money, and the evil version where you kill them all.
Why the heck not cut out at least two of them? Just slap a button on the interface which basically kicks you back into combat mode while yelling out some insult about your target’s race/class/country/wife/pet/whatever? Bam, one option down, we can concentrate on more useful dialogue. After all, do we really need 100 different specially=-scripted versions of “eat puke and die motherXXXXXX!!!111” ?
What about the second one? Why not just make money rewards run off of a base. Having high “reputation” or :light side points" or “good points” helps you with some people, the opposite for others. Bargaining skill shelps you with everyone. Bam, now we’ve got more options.
I also generally don’t like the interpretation of good guys as wusses. Gandalf did not suck up to random people, and in fact was pretty willing to stare them down! Heroes should be given a chance to do decent things but not be required to suck up.
Fully destructible environments. Red Faction tried it, and perhaps partially because Red Faction sucked, it hasn’t much caught on. It’s something that developers don’t seem to spend a lot of time considering. Though I’m sure it’s very difficult, time consuming, and expensive to make it look good.
This was the first thing that sprung to mind for me as well, although I think we will see this in the future with the growth of physics processors that will allow all kinds of possibilities. Falling buildings, collapsing bridges, all kinds of stuff. It should even be possible to blast through walls that are blocking certain goals, provided you have the ammunition available … except it won’t ever be available.
anamnesis wins the thread. If you could blast through any wall you wanted, the game designers would just think of another way to stop you from going off course. Oop, sorry that wall is reinforced, you need an explosive. Oh, we didn’t give you explosives yet? Sorry, just have to go around.
Not even explosions, what about chips of rock or drywall or whatever being knocked off with small arms fire? What about enemies bursting through walls, chasing you around? What about varying material mechanics (you can shoot through drywall but not plaster or metal)? Wouldn’t be so much a game play mechanic as an immersion factor. When I shoot at a wall and all that shows up is a little sprite scuff-mark, I’m reminded that I’m playing a video game. I want to have to weigh the risk of a ricochet hitting me when I try to shoot through a lock, and perhaps determine that it’s safer to try and find the key or pick the lock. What about strategically using ricochets to kill enemies?
I’m behind the times so I don’t know if any of these have been done yet, but:
you ought to be able to toggle autopickup. It’s ridiculous to waste most of a health or ammo pack because you couldn’t avoid stepping on it while only down a little.
Are objects randomly orientable yet, so you can turn them? How about picking up an object, carrying it and putting it down again?
Not every enemy should be a suicidal berserker. The weaker ones should occasionally decide discretion is the better part of valor. A security guard armed with a semiautomatic pistol should not stand there and try to take down a guy in powered armor with a gatling gun.
Well, you obviously noticed that one of those threads was two years old, and the other 5 months, but eh; it’s actually quite interesting to read the OP from the first thread you posted, which wanted to know if the following were plausible in a shooter-type game…
[ul][li]Your enemies do not have unlimited ammo. If they run low on ammo, they adjust their strategy or retreat.[/li][li]In fact, you compete with NPCs for ammo, health and other goodies.[/li][li]Your maximum speed drops when you’re wounded.[/li][li]You can’t carry unlimited stuff, and have to choose what to keep and what to drop. Your maximum speed also drops when you’re overburdened.[/li][li]Your enemies are slower, weaker and (sometimes) more cowardly when they’re injured.[/li][li]You don’t automatically pick up any usable object when you touch it. You have to use a Pickup command.[/li][li]You can actually carry healthkits with you for later use.[/li][li]You need to eat and drink occasionally. And not that “99 cans of soda will restore you from the brink of death to full health” either.[/li][li]Injuries continue to drain health from you until treated.[/li][li]All objects are breakable to some degree, although obviously cliff faces are a lot harder to damage than window glass.[/li][li]You can pick up objects (within weight limits) to move them.[/ul][/li]… because I’ve bolded all the ones found in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl. Lumpy must be a happy gamer right now.
Oh, it’s rather simple to do fully destructible environments. See X-Com which was released in 1993 and the Ultima’s six to eight starting in 1989 had that ability though most structures were made indestructible (can’t have people blowing holes in the wall of the last dungeon with a cannon, after all). The problem is when your engine is 3D it becomes extremely difficult. The reason for that is 3D engines work quickly by precalculating a lot of important things that dramatically change when the environment changes.
Most games that feature “fully destructible environments” these days do so by making large chucks of the environment the same thing as enemies with very low poly-counts. It’s rather unsatisfying, though, since the result is typically just a few things and rather unnatural feeling.
I know it’s not an FPS, but Silent Storm did destructible environments very well. You couldn’t exactly blast yourself a foxhole out of the ground, but you could blow holes in almost any wall, floor, ceiling, etc., and bullets passed through some materials. Of course, the limitation was on how many explosives you had and how well you could use them.
The game did require a hefty rig (for the time) because once a wall was blown up, every brick and piece of rubble became its own entity and required processing time.
I join Dead Badger in thinking that Lumpy would like STALKER (or, at least, the ideas and game mechanics).
In addition to the technical problems, designing gameplay in a completely destructable environment is a huge pain. If the player can blow through walls then you have to build lots of extra content just in case the player happens to blast his way into an unexpected area. The enemies have to have more robust A.I. to deal with the changing geometry. And it completely wrecks the pacing of the level. Most shooter levels are designed like amusement park rides, with intentional highs and lows to give the player the feeling of growing excitement and danger. Once the player can make his own path through the level you lose a lot of control over the gameplay arc.
Fully destructable environments = lots of extra work to create a level that probably won’t be as exciting as a well-scripted non-destructable level.
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted games to redesign each level each time you played it. A lot of gaming is memorization. You memorize bad guy locations, item locations, proper routes through the levels, etc. What if you couldn’t do that because each time you played it all of that was different. I have no idea if that is at all feasible but I would love to see that.
A lot of games have done this, mostly RPGs and adventure games though, and imo, they all suck. The lack of a creative vision destroys these games for me.
Diablo II has randomly-generated levels, with the result that many players download third-party cheat programs to show them the level before they explore it. The Dope contingent of players, meanwhile, figured out the pattern (or at least, part of it) to the level generation algorithm, so we could go exactly where we wanted without needing a cheat.
Oddly enough, I agree with both of you. With many games, especially after you’ve finished it once, you know where to go for the items, so you make a beeline for them and get as powerful as you can get as fast as you can. I’d love to see people have to rediscover dungeons and catacombs (because those should be random, castles…not so much). Although, I agree with the “lack of creativity” stamp affixed to a game that had random dungeon generation…unless the random generation were dont very well. I don’t even know if it’s possible, but I’d like to see it.
Nethack has destructible environments, random level generation, and surprisingly complex AI and physics. Of course, it’s also a 2D turn-based world with ASCII characters for graphics.
A game built with these kinds of things becomes less of an entertaining ride through a story and more of a sandbox/virtual world simulation. I actually enjoy the virtual-world games a lot more, but they’re not so common these days. My wife and I are acually working on developing a privately created, low-budget MMORPG and are trying to implement a lot of these features (destructible environment, dynamic content generation).
Yeah, I’ve always been curious why there isn’t non violent, non destructive games. I know there are games, like baseball and hockey. Kind of like Zelda but not battling so much.
Why don’t they use a similar environment to teach languages? You could make the interface you on the ground in Mexico City with some goal in mind. You have to pick up language (instead of life force) to get through the games. It’s seems like it would lend itself to this really well. You could go into the bar and try and order drinks, find a hotel, airport. Order dinner etc. Only fun, y’know? I’d buy one of these games in every language!
Also, why don’t they make games for senior citizens? You could make it all Peyton Place like only set in a nursing home. You could create an environment like the world they remember including the soundtrack. They’d be able to dance and sing, or fly aircraft over Europe. Gossip, interaction, mental stimulation and you could adjust the sensitivity to suit the senior, for slower reaction times and stuff. The pretext would have to be simple, the fonts really large etc.
I came into this thread to ask this as I have been curious for some time. But I see from reading up thread that I may be actually side tracking a discussion of destructible environs and immorality, more ammo and the like.
